Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka ( born October 7, 1934 in Newark, New Jersey; † January 9, 2014 ) was an American poet, playwright, music critic and prose writer.

Life

Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoy Jones. At eighteen, he wrote his name LeRoi Jones, 1967, he took the name imamu Ameer Baraka, which he abwandelte its present form later.

Until 1965

Baraka studied philosophy and religious studies at Rutgers University, Columbia University and at Howard University without obtaining a degree. He went in 1954 to the U.S. Air Force and was commissioned officer ( sergeant ). In 1957 he was denounced as a communist and, when Soviet material found on him, dishonorably discharged from the army. He then moved to Greenwich Village and worked initially in a records storage. During this time, his interest in jazz developed; at the same time he came into contact with the Beat Poets who influenced his early poetry greatly. He founded in 1958 the Totem Press and married in the same year Hettie Cohen. His wife worked as an editor at Partisan Review, and with their experience led the couple eight issues the literary magazine Yugen out ( 1958-1962 ).

In 1960 he visited Cuba, which launched his transformation into a political artist. In 1961 the collection of poems Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, 1963 Blues People: Negro Music in White America. For his 1964 piece Dutchman premiered in the same year he received an Obie Award. After the assassination of Malcolm X, he distanced himself from the Beat Poets, left his wife and their two children and moved to Harlem, as he now as a black cultural nationalist ( "black cultural nationalist " ) understood. Hettie Cohen claimed in her autobiography, How I Became Hettie Jones ( 1990), Baraka had abused her time of their marriage.

1966-1980

1966 Baraka married his second wife, Amina Baraka which should be called later. From 1967 he taught at the San Francisco State University. In the same year he was arrested in the course of race riots that broke out after the assassination of Martin Luther King in Newark, accused against the state for illegal weapons possession and resistance and sentenced to three years in prison. In an appeal of this decision was rejected again. In 1967, Jones the short-lived record label Jihad on which the productions of jihad Cultural Center in Newark (New Jersey) should appear. The label released in 1968, only three albums, most famously the Sunny Murray LP Albert Ayler and Don Cherry with. In 1968 his second book Jazz Black Music. In 1970 he supported Kenneth A. Gibson at his candidacy for the office of mayor of Newark; Gibson was elected the first black mayor of the city.

By 1974, Baraka distanced to black nationalism and was oriented from now on Marxism and the liberation movements in the Third World. In 1979 he began teaching at SUNY in the Africana Studies Department. In the same year he was sentenced after an altercation with his wife to social work service. Around this time he begins to write his autobiography. In 1980, he distanced himself from anti-Semitic remarks in previous years and stated that he had seen his errors and now sees itself as anti - Zionists.

From 1980

1984 Baraka was appointed full professor. In 1987, he held together with Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison a eulogy at the funeral of James Baldwin. The American Book Award, he was awarded for his life's work and the Langston Hughes Award in 1989. In 1990, he co-wrote the autobiography of Quincy Jones and in 1998 he played in Warren Beatty's film Bulworth with. He was appointed by the New Jersey State Poet Laureate for 2002 - an award to which he had to do without in 2003 after a controversy over his poem "Somebody Blew Up America " was ablaze. Some lines were interpreted as Baraka say, Israel was behind the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001 in 2010 his book Digging was: . The Afro - American Soul of American Classical Music awarded the American Book Award,

Works

• Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicied note, Totem Press, New York 1961. Poems
• Blues People: Negro Music in White America, W. Morrow & Co. New York 1963 Blues People; Black and her music in white America, Joseph Melzer Verlag, Darmstadt 1969
• Abstract in: March - texts 1 and trivial myths Area, Erftstadt 2004, pp. 98ff. March 1 texts first in March, 1969.

• Dante's system of hell; Novel, Joseph Melzer Verlag, Darmstadt 1966

• (. Cuba Libre ) way out in hatred: From Liberalism to Black Power, Joseph Melzer, Darmstadt, 1966

• Black music, March Verlag, Frankfurt 1970

• Slow down; Narratives, Joseph Melzer, Darmstadt 1968 [ Going Down Slow appeared in the Evergreen Review]

• Dutchman, Faber, 1969
• Dutchman, S. Fischer, Frankfurt 1970?